he called “reversed consonance.” As he explained it, “a rhyme fornear would be run, green, reign,” with the initial n-r combination reversed in each instance. Such a rhyme, of course, is visible if the reader has been forewarned, but even then the ear can hardly notice the event. Still, the device is one more variation among Villa’s many attempts, through decreation and reassemblage, to penetrate the energy fields of convention and release explosive forces from the very “depths of Being,” as Sitwell puts it. Much more interesting, however, and more successful than reversed consonance in satisfying this quest for fire is the inexorable forward force of both his love lyrics and his “divine poems.” Occasionally these poems are indistinguishable from one another because the protagonist addresses both his beloved and his God with the same possessive, mastering rhetoric: “Between God’s eyelashes I look at you,/ Contend with the Lord to love you. . . .” At times in compulsive narcissism, the protagonist even treats them as mirrors for himself, then briefly relents, guiltily considering himself to be Lucifer or Judas. Such interplays of ambiguity are made inevitable by the poems’ brevity and density, the constant ellipses and startling juxtapositions: oranges and giraffes, pigeons and watermelons, yellow strawberries, “pink monks eating blue raisins,” the crucified Christ as peacock, the wind shining and sun blowing.

Sometimes in these poems, one can recognize the synesthesia of the French Symbolists, Cummings’s curtailments of standard grammar, Blakean nature as divine emblems, or the equivalent of cubist/Surrealist transformations of reality. Mostly, however, Villa was an original. One senses in him a compelling inner necessity to prove that purity proceeds from the proper combination of what are normally considered impurities. His was the rebel’s revenge against mediocrity, a Promethean ascent-in-force to regain godhead. Fellow poet Rolando Tinio, in Brown Heritage (1967), says that Villa “speaks of God becoming Man and concludes that Man has become God.” Villa’s countrymen grudgingly accepted his preeminence abroad. Villa, however, always thought of himself as too exceptional to be a representative Filipino. He would not live in the shadow of his wealthy father in the Philippines; at best he could make a desperate living in New York during the Depression and World War II. Emotionally homeless, he fortified his exile by offering in his poetry a protagonist both essential and universal. For Villa, that meant a rejection of common codes and orders, a rising above all local circumstances. Have Come, Am Here reflects this profound need for self-justification.

Resounding critical acclaim for the poems of Have Come, Am Here came instantly, from Sitwell, Richard Eberhart, Horace Gregory, Moore, and well over a dozen world anthologists. For them, Villa’s poetry was as cryptic as a Zen koan and therefore as rewarding as any other religious meditation, the very dislocation of syntax soliciting a revelation. Still others, entranced by their initial experience of Have Come, Am Here, have reported that later readings showed a tendency in Villa toward formula that was too facile, as if, were any poem shaken hard enough, its words would finally form another, by the laws of chance and permutation. The poetic vocabulary is not only too romantic for pragmatic readers, but it is also rather impoverished because it is more repetitive than resonant. Similarly, these poems, whether sacred or profane, ultimately manifest the same basic love for a self more praised than explored. Readers accustomed to tangible substance and foreseeable consequences are troubled by an incandescence that, for them, blinds more than it illuminates.

Volume Two

The same polarity of reaction occurred with the appearance of the “comma poems” in Volume Two. Between each word in these poems Villa placed an unspaced comma, “regulating the poem’s density and time movement.” His intent was to control the pace of each poem’s progress with measured dignity. The effect resembles musical notation, although Villa preferred to compare the technique with Georges Seurat’s pointillism. Unlike reversed consonance, this innovative device does indeed add “visual distinction.” It cannot, however, rescue such verses as Villa’s “Caprices” or most of his aphorisms; it can only make them seem pretentious. Some of the new “divine poems,” nevertheless, were among the author’s best, their dynamics rising from the mystery of things seen in mid-metamorphosis: for example, “The, bright, Centipede” beginning its stampede from “What, celestial, province!” Villa’s quarrels with his co-Creator (“My dark hero”) also managed a magnificence that can pass beyond self-celebration. There is as much visionary quickening in the image of “God, dancing, on, phosphorescent, toes,/ Among, the, strawberries” as in the inscrutable Lion carrying “God, the, Dark, Corpse!” down Jacob’s ladder. In poems as powerful as these, the commas seem like sacerdotal vestments woven from metallic mesh. In lesser poems, however, the commas serve merely as a façade to conceal or decorate an inner vacuousness. A few poems, in fact, were rescued from his earliest volumes and have merely been rehabilitated through use of this fresh overlay.

More serious questions than those raised by Volume Two’s unevenness have been directed toward Villa’s perpetual reliance on a small cluster of romantic terms whose effect was reduced as their possible combinations approach exhaustion. Furthermore, the prolonged role of rebel led Villa to virtual self-imitation in the steady use of reversals, negatives, and reductives. The “not-face” and “un-ears” of his earlier lyrics became an established pattern later: “In, my, undream, of, death,/ I, unspoke, the, Word”; “the, Holy,/ Unghost—”; “Unnight,/ Me”; “In, not, getting, there, is, perfect, Arrival”; “The, clock, was, not, a, clock”; “May, spring, from, Un—,/ Light. . . .” By substitution, strange, suggestive equations can emerge (“Myself, as, Absence, discoverer,/ Myself, as, Presence, searcher”), but so can codes so manneristic that others can imitate them successfully (“Yesterday, I, awoke, today”; gold black-birds; blue-eyed trees). Two different kinds of innocence are offered: that of the true visionary breaking through the barriers of ordinary reality to a tranquillity beyond words and worry; and that of the mindless child playing at anagrams with alphabet blocks (as the poet himself much earlier playfully signed himself “O. Sevilla”).

Much mirroring is bound to occur in a poet who is less God-driven, as Eberhart claims Villa was, than obsessed with the trinity of his own godhead (Poet, Word, and Poem), as Tinio suggests. Within those confinements, intensity has to compensate for lack of variety; and critics of all persuasions admit that, at his best, Villa did brilliantly manage that irresistible tenacity, that sense of seizure, even if at the expense of the subject’s being its sole object. Dismissing nakedness for the sake of translucent nudity, he came to sacrifice more and more the sensate body of other persons to exclamations on his own exultant sensibility. That habit limits the plausibility of comparisons that Villa offered between his own work and the paintings of Seurat or Pablo Picasso. Seurat, understanding the optics of his day, provides in each canvas the subjective process of atomized vision and the objective configurations of person, place, and thing which that process projects. Picasso, similarly, even in a hundred portraits of the same model, admits and conveys the realization of plenitude, of multiple perspectives, as both perceiver and perceived undergo subtle alterations in time, angle of vision, psychological attitude, degree of rapport, and the like.

Selected Poems and New

That no such plenitude, no such endless surprise was available to Villa became clear with the publication of Selected Poems and New. There are several noteworthy new comma poems in this collection, though no startling innovations within that general usage. “Xalome,” “And, if, Theseus—then, Minotaur,” “Death and Dylan Thomas,” and “The Anchored Angel” at least offer ponderous objects for contemplation that, unlike his aphorisms, his lighthearted cries over the blue-eyed bird in a tree, and “A Valentine for Edith Sitwell,” appropriate with ease the pace provided by the commas. Such objects also warrant the invitation to meditation that Villa’s associational techniques offered in the best of his poems.

By far the larger part of the previously unpublished section of this volume is devoted to forty-eight “adaptations,” conversions of other people’s prose into poems. His sources were Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, Simone Weil’s notebooks, André Gide’s journals, and book reviews and letters to the editors of Time and Life. No word of his own is interjected into the originals, although “to achieve the tightness of verse” he omitted occasional “connectives and extra adjectives.” In several cases, borrowing from the visual arts, Villa offered what he calls collages: the original lines of a Life magazine caption, for example, rearranged in their sequence; or portions from two different sections of a book brought together. Many of these adaptations received critical praise, particularly as they showed a masterful control of musical phrasing, in a variety of tempos and turns that indicate once more the limitations of the comma as a single musical measure. The value of the adaptations naturally depends so heavily on the intrinsic merit of the originals—Franz Kafka,Henry Miller,William Carlos Williams—that one might have expected the application of this kind of craft to others’ work as an early stage of apprenticeship. The adaptations lack, for example, the degree of participation-beyond-translation visible in Robert Lowell’s volume of “collaborations,” Imitations (1961); nor have they generated any insights or techniques, as did Ezra Pound’s experience with free translations from Provençal poetry that allowed him, in his The Cantos (1979), to adapt documents from American history as well as selected phrases and ideograms from the Italian and the Chinese.

Cultural reidentification

After Selected Poems and New, Villa’s effort was devoted less to improving his reputation than to maintaining it, particularly in the Philippines. A number of chapbooks appeared in Manila, in 1962, reprinting portions of his earlier writing, to reestablish himself in his native land. This latter-day identification with a culture that finds no specific presence in his poems and from which he remains geographically remote seemed rather anomalous, but there are Filipinos who think he performed better ambassadorial service than many foreign affairs officers. Villa’s egocentric poetry is at the opposite extreme from the Filipinos’ sense of togetherness (bayanihan) or the family extended through ritual kinship. His role as rebel was not incongruous, however, if viewed from his people’s long history of oppression as a Spanish colony; the Philippine Revolution of 1896, which briefly established a republic whose rejection by the United States caused the Philippine-American War, 1899 to 1902; the Commonwealth years, during which Filipinos had to prove their superiority in order to be considered equals; the guerrilla years of World War II; and the strains of political but not quite economic independence thereafter.

Whether he intended it or not, Villa reinforced the feeling of those Filipinos who demand that they be defined by their own mores and folkways; his “unsonment” poems can be taken as collective resentment of paternalism, however benevolent, proffered by former colonial powers. Even the seeming blasphemy of certain “divine poems” resembles the hybrid religious observances among Asia’s only Christian people, once resentful of Spanish religious orders that served as arms of overseas administrations. The nationalists can understand in Villa their defiance and aspiration, the right to self-determination, the refusal to be humiliated by anyone. For these various reasons, Villa continued to be ranked highest among an increasing number of distinguished Filipino poets.